Conventionally, a large amount of labor is required to analyze a nerve cell. For example, in visual analysis of a nerve cell based on a microscope image, a method of inputting figure information of a single nerve cell to a computer relying on a manual operation which checks nerve cells with the eyes of a skilled researcher one by one is mainly employed. In such an operation, simple software for visualization is frequently used in visualization. However, the operation includes a large number of operations, and consequently, quantity of work tends to be large.
For example, it is not uncommon that several days are required to complete analysis of one image.
This is because a nerve cell has a complex figure in which one nerve cell includes several tens of dendrites, and each dendrite has several tens of thousands of spines (post-synaptic regions) thereon. For the complex structure, in a conventional image processing algorithm, it is difficult to automatically analyze a figure of a nerve cell.